Fire and Brimstone
12 artists exploring the drama and sensuality of the casting process
15th June - 24th July 2009
Over the 6000 year history of bronze casting, mankind has become so technically proficient that the creative possibilities of the process are often overlooked. The ambition driving precise, ever-better accuracy of reproduction and the constant constraints of cost have largely kept cast metal sculpture as a traditional form of art. Not even the Arts and Crafts movement or the varied groups within Modernism with their ‘truth to materials’ ethos, strayed far from the traditional role for bronze casting.
‘Fire and Brimstone’ is an attempt to reveal the magical transformation effected by fire and metal on sculptural media. It seems a perfect opportunity to explore the ambiguity suggested by positive and negative or solid and fluid, the idea of an enclosing skin, a metallic membrane that flows and entombs either a space or another object and all the raw, creative and sensual possibilities of the casting process. To this end, we invited 12 artists to use the foundry processes to create an object.
Photographs by Steve Russell
